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5/4/11

American Mathematical Association Accuses Mathematicians Of Incorrectly using VAM

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Value-Added Models

In the past two decades, a group of statisticians has focused on addressing the first of these four problems. This was natural. Mathematicians routinely create models for complicated systems that are similar to a large collection of students and teachers with many factors affecting individual outcomes over time.

Here’s a typical, although simplified, example, called the “split-plot design”. You want to test
fertilizer on a number of different varieties of some crop. You have many plots, each divided
into subplots. After assigning particular varieties to each subplot and randomly assigning levels of fertilizer to each whole plot, you can then sit back and watch how the plants grow as you apply the fertilizer. The task is to determine the effect of the fertilizer on growth, distinguishing it from the effects from the different varieties. Statisticians have developed standard mathematical tools (mixed models) to do this.

Does this situation sound familiar? Varieties, plots, fertilizer…students, classrooms, teachers? Dozens of similar situations arise in many areas, from agriculture to MRI analysis, always with the same basic ingredients—a mixture of fixed and random effects—and it is therefore not surprising that statisticians suggested using mixed models to analyze test data and determine “teacher effects”.This is often explained to the public by analogy.

One cannot accurately measure the quality of a teacher merely by looking at the scores on a single test at the end of a school year. If one teacher starts with all poorly prepared students, while another starts with all excellent, we would be misled by scores from a single test given to each class. To account for such differences, we might use two tests, comparing scores from the end of one year to the next. The focus is on how much the scores increase rather than the scores themselves. That’s the basic idea behind “value-added”.

But value-added models (VAMs) are much more than merely comparing successive test scores.
Given many scores (say, grades 3–8) for many students with many teachers at many schools, one creates a mixed model for this complicated situation. The model is supposed to take into account all the factors that might influence test results—past history of the student, socioeconomic status, and so forth. The aim is to predict, based on all these past factors, the growth in test scores for students taught by a particular teacher. The actual change represents this more sophisticated “value added”—good when it’s larger than expected; bad when it’s smaller.

The best-known VAM, devised by William Sanders, is a mixed model (actually, several models), which is based on Henderson’s mixed-model equations, although mixed models originate much earlier [Sanders 1997]. One calculates (a huge computational effort!) the best linear unbiased predictors for the effects of teachers on scores. The precise details are unimportant here, but the process is similar to all mathematical modeling, with underlying assumptions and a number of choices in the model’s construction.

History

When value-added models were first conceived, even their most ardent supporters cautioned
about their use [Sanders 1995, abstract]. They were a new tool that allowed us to make sense of mountains of data, using mathematics in the same way it was used to understand the growth of crops or the effects of a drug. But that tool was based on a statistical model, and inferences about individual teachers might not be valid, either because of faulty assumptions or because of normal (and expected) variation.

Such cautions were qualified, however, and one can see the roots of the modern embrace of VAMs in two juxtaposed quotes from William Sanders, the father of the value-added movement, which appeared in an article in Teacher Magazine in the year 2000. The article’s author reiterates the familiar cautions about VAMs, yet in the next paragraph seems to forget them:

Sanders has always said that scores for individual teachers should not be released publicly. “That would be totally inappropriate,” he says. “This is about trying to improve our schools, not embarrassing teachers. If their scores were made available, it would create chaos because most parents would be trying to get their kids into the same classroom.”

Still, Sanders says, it’s critical that ineffective teachers be identified. “The evidence is overwhelming,” he says, “that if any child catches two very weak teachers in a row, unless there is a major intervention, that kid never recovers from it. And that’s something that as a society we can’t ignore” [Hill 2000].